


Fall Classic

by GeneralIrritation



Series: The Gotham City Society of Fireproof Women [8]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: I GOT YOUR ANGST RIGHT HERE PAL!, Multi, Past Abuse, you want angst?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 16:53:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21211898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GeneralIrritation/pseuds/GeneralIrritation
Summary: As Batman, Batwoman, and Batgirl hunt down the clues to stop a mad bomber, Stephanie Brown's world comes crashing down around her.This is how it happens.This is how the Batfamily breaks.thegeneralreturns.tumblr.com





	Fall Classic

Conventional wisdom states the following:

_“Gotham City will never win a World Series.” _

As the twentieth century neared its midpoint, Major League Baseball only stretched as far west as Saint Louis. The western half of the nation longed for representation in its pastime.

Which was why the foundation of the Gotham City Knights, scheduled to make their debut for the American League in the spring of 1946, was so curious and so controversial. Indeed, it was only an American League expansion, and the National League had no expansion team of its own to compensate. The mayors of every major city from the middle of the nation to as far west as Los Angeles, Coast City, and San Francisco accused Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis of corruption, saying that the integrity he showed during the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 had gone by the wayside.

Bribery within the office of the Commissioner of Baseball was alleged, as was blackmail, though nothing was proven. The fact of the matter remained that Gotham City had one wealthy person who could not only pay for a team, but pay for a stadium.

That person being hotelier Leland Cobblepot. Son of late mayor and steel magnate Theodore Cobblepot, and grandfather of present day black market arms dealer Oswald _“The Penguin”_ Cobblepot.

It is largely forgotten exactly how the name of Cobblepot because so tarnished in Gotham City, with some pointing to the actions of The Penguin, while others pointed to their losing feud with the Wayne family.

But the city’s enmity toward the Cobblepot clan truly had its genesis at the groundbreaking ceremony of Cobblepot Field, which was the Gotham City Knights’ initial home in the city, just off of the East End on the mainland. It was at this ceremony that owner Leland Cobblepot decreed that, for the Knights’ inaugural season they would, in fact, win the World Series.

There certainly was a case to be made for such a prediction coming true. 1946 was the first year back from World War II for the cream of the crop of Major League Baseball. The other teams had suffered from declining attendance and anemic ticket sales during the war years, and they simply did not have the resources to aggressively scout new talent.

An affliction that Leland Cobblepot and the Gotham City Knights did not suffer.

So the Knights’ inaugural season came in 1946, and… they did not go to the World Series.

In fact, the Knights fared so poorly that the _light _ from the World Series would have taken seven separate ice ages to reach them.

The Gotham City Knights lost one-hundred-sixteen games that year, out of one-hundred-fifty-four. It would take another sixteen years for any other team to lose that many games in a year, until the inaugural 1962 season of the New York Mets. And even then, Major League Baseball had extended the season by eight games to one-hundred-sixty-two. If that hadn’t happened, who knows how long it would have taken for a team to suck as bad as Gotham City did?

But hey, at least the Mets won the World Series seven years later.

The Knights? Not so much. Leland Cobblepot sold the Gotham City Knights two years after that disastrous first season. 

Here’s the thing about baseball fans:

They are a cowardly and superstitious lot.

Anyone with a semblance of rationality would have pinned the Knights’ problems on bad coaching and managing, and upon the poor ownership from which they stemmed (for indeed, while Leland Cobblepot splurged on on-field talent, he was dangerously thrifty when it came to coaches and managers).

But not Gotham City baseball fans. To them, Cobblepot had angered the Baseball Gods with his hubris, and the Deities of the Diamond were both fickle and vengeful. So came the maxim that bears repeating:

_“Gotham City will never win a World Series.” _

And it wasn’t like baseball was unfamiliar with the concept of _ “The Curse.” _ There was, for example, The Curse of the Bambino, which prevented the Boston Red Sox from winning a World Series for the eighty-six years between 1918 and 2004, after the team’s owner traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees (in exchange, legend had it, for a stake in the Broadway musical _ No, No, Nanette). _

This curse was actually true. Famed magician and Justice League member Zatanna Zatara proved it on the Discovery Channel when she used magic to test the soil and groundwater around Boston’s Fenway Park.

Similarly, there was the Curse of the Billy Goat in Chicago. Though baseball lore decreed that Billy Goat Tavern owner William Sianis (no relation to the late Gotham City gangster and supervillain Roman _“Black Mask” _Sionis) placed it upon the Chicago Cubs after Wrigley Field management asked him to leave Game Four of the World Series in 1945, the Cubs didn’t win the Fall Classic between 1908 and 2016.

This curse was actually false. For almost eleven decades, the Cubs were just a shitty baseball team. 

Professional sports in America is one of the last truly family-run enterprises, so ownership of the Gotham City Knights passed among the wealthy families of Gotham from the end of the forties to the early eighties. The Moxons got custody of the team after the Cobblepots. The Paige family got it after that. There were even rumors in the early seventies of the Falcones, a mafia family of no small infamy, wanting a stake in the team, but Major League Baseball came in and put a stop to it. And during this stretch of time, the team itself fluctuated between cellar-swelling and mediocrity. Just another team to get the piss slapped out of it by New York or Boston or Metropolis. 

Through it all, though, the team was actually profitable. There was a scare that the Knights would be moved to Fawcett City in the late sixties, but nothing ever came of it. Gotham City loved baseball, even though, as the team’s win-loss record would show, baseball did not love Gotham City.

The purchase of the Gotham City Knights by Ace Chemical in 1981 marked one of the infinitesimal number of times during the course of human history that corporate ownership actually improved something. The team even made a few playoff berths, though never getting farther than the American League Divisional Series. Nine years ago, billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist Bruce Wayne paid for a new stadium to replace the crumbling Cobblepot Field. The two billion dollar, state-of-the-art, 47,715 seat Wayne Stadium was erected in downtown Gotham, right there on the waterfront with a view of Miagani Island over the left field wall. No one’s taxes went up, and Gotham’s citizens didn’t have to bear the shame of a corporate sponsored major sports complex with an embarrassing name like those poor pieces of shit in Louisville, Kentucky who have to live with the mortification of existing in the same city as the KFC Yum! Center.

And then came _this _ season.

This season of baseball was the first season to occur in Gotham City since the Battle of Founders Island the previous December, when three-hundred-seventy-seven civilians and forty-eight superheroes died defending the island, the city, and the world against a regenerating army of stone soldiers summoned by a Greek Goddess, who was inhabiting the body of _another _Greek Goddess intent on destroying the Multiverse.

And the Battle of Founders Island itself was a year-and-a-half removed from the thirty-nine terrifying hours when Gotham City was taken hostage by a former mayor who had been raised from the dead, and operated under the supervillain sobriquet _“The Undying.” _

And how did The Undying make his public debut?

By appearing through a magical portal on the pitcher’s mound of Wayne Stadium during the third inning of a game in mid-July, and putting three nine millimeter rounds into the face of twenty-two-year-old Gotham City Knights starting pitcher Barry Jacinto at point-blank range.

So to say that both Gotham City and its baseball team had something to prove in the wake of all of this horror was putting the matter mildly. 

And prove it, the Gotham City Knights did. They finished the season with ninety-five wins and sixty-seven losses, ensuring entry into the American League Wild Card Game, where they beat fellow AL East contenders the Boston Red Sox five to four.

_(NOTE: During this season of baseball, the Boston Red Sox wore black armbands emblazoned with the letter A in orange in memory of King Orin of Atlantis. King Orin was known to people on the surface by his human name of Arthur Curry, and by his superhero pseudonym _“Aquaman.” _A casualty of the afore-mentioned Battle of Founders Island, Aquaman was a proud New Englander and a fiercely loyal fan of the Red Sox. So loyal was he that he took the epithet _“Masshole”-- _a taunt long used by Yankees fans against the Boston faithful--as a term of endearment, even though his birth certificate said he was born in Maine, and not Massachusetts.) _

From there it was on to the American League Division Series, where they took the Cleveland Indians in the full five games, winning their first ALDS in team history.

On the other side of that? The similar Cinderella story and AL West champs the Gateway Archers. It was a seven game series, three of which going to extra innings, but the Knights’ formidable bullpen and penchant for small-ball was too much for the Archers to handle.

They got their first pennant and they were finally, at long last, going to the World Series. 

But who was waiting for them?

The National League pennant winners for three straight years (and the winner of the World Series the year prior), the Central City Diamonds.

To say they were the opposite of the Gotham City Knights would be an understatement. The Knights just barely made the Wild Card Game. The Diamonds, on the other hand, finished the regular season with one-hundred-eighteen wins and forty-four losses, which was a record in the modern era. The Gotham City Knights needed all the games they could to secure their Division and League victories. The Central City Diamonds, in complete contrast, swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLDS and the National City Guardians (who managed to make it to the playoffs in only their third season of existence, good for them) in the NLCS. And the Diamonds’ payroll was three times larger than the Knights’.

No one gave Gotham City a shot. The odds in Vegas said that this year’s Fall Classic would be over in four.

But the Knights were wily. If everything old is new again, then the Gotham City general manager, former Pittsburgh Pirate Diego Aguayo, was living proof. He had a team that was playing like it was 1909, emphasising methodically getting runners on base as opposed to power-hitting home runs. This strategy exploited the one weakness that the Diamonds had, which was their comparatively shallow bullpen.

This should have been a sweep.

But the Gotham City Knights, plucky underdogs that they were, forced a Game Seven.

Game Seven is in Wayne Stadium.

And Game Seven… starts right now.

* * *

**TOP OF THE FIRST**

The national anthem was performed by famed recording artist and Gotham City native Johnny Charisma, and the ceremonial first pitch was thrown by Gotham City Knights Hall of Fame pitcher Jerome Irquidez.

All 47,515 seats in Wayne Stadium were filled on this chilly October night. Which wasn’t to mention all of the food and merchandise vendors, the security detail, maintenance workers, sports media for fifteen countries representing all six inhabited continents, the umpires, the grounds crew, and, of course, the players.

On the mound, sixty feet and six inches away from home plate, stood number 35, Right-handed starting pitcher Ivan Ross. In his white uniform and blue cap, he looked as lonely as he felt.

Gateway second baseman Pablo Rafaldi, he of the .263 batting average and the irritating habit of clipping the ball into the gaps in the outfield to get lead-off doubles, analyzed him as though he were a math problem he was on the verge of solving.

Ross got the signal from Knights catcher Harold Levy… and Ross liked what he saw.

He let loose.

The ball seemed well on its way to the bottom right corner of the strike zone, before it plummeted into Levy’s glove. Rafaldi could not check his swing in time.

Home plate umpire Calvin Hall called it a strike, and in that instant, a simultaneous calm and giddiness spread among the almost forty-eight thousand Gotham City faithful.

So far, so good…

* * *

**FIFTEEN BLOCKS AWAY, AT THE OAKEY PAPER BUILDING**

“What’s the score?” Batgirl asked.

“The game just started,” Batwoman said. “It’s nothing-nothing.”

Spoiler just sighed.

The three of them were in the alley, away from the police barricade around the Oakey Paper Building.

Two days ago, a Shadow Density bomb was stolen from the STAR Labs facility in Bludhaven. A Shadow-Density bomb had the capability to cause a combustive photonic reaction in matter under a certain light level. Which didn’t sound too scary to Stephanie _“Spoiler” _ Brown initially. Until Batman elucidated that shadows were everywhere. In the folds of clothing, and around specks of dirt, and in between grains of sand.

An activated Shadow Density Gel the size of the head of a pin could disintegrate a tank.

The man on the roof of the Oakey Paper Building had stolen a Shadow Density Gel the size of a die from a board game. It could be activated any number of ways, the most commonly tested ways in the STAR Labs facility being pressure and radio waves.

The man on the roof of the Oakey Paper Building was…

Spoiler winced behind her black mask, and when she opened her eyes, she hazarded a glance at Batgirl. Whether to feel better in this moment or feel worse, she would not have been able to say.

Beneath the skin-tight Batgirl costume was Cassandra Cain, who was Stephanie Brown’s best friend.

Cassandra Cain was also the girl that Stephanie Brown was hopelessly, pathetically, desperately, _ impossibly _ in love with.

There had at least been an attraction to Cassandra since the first moment Stephanie had laid eyes on her in the Batcave almost two-and-a-half years ago. Back then, the only name that Cassandra answered to was _ “Orphan,” _ and she was a mute, illiterate, scrawny martial arts prodigy with a cast on her arm.

Stephanie instantly signed that cast, and immediately implored the others in Batman’s network (calling them, in the moment, _“dumb whores”) _ to do the same.

But that initial attraction to Cassandra only grew deeper the more the two hung around each other. The more Stephanie was exposed to Cassandra’s innate intelligence that belied her reading, writing, and speaking difficulties. Her essential kindness. 

And her off-kilter sense of humor that allowed her to laugh at _Mortal Kombat _ fatalities.

It got to the point that Stephanie could stand at the rim of her own emotions, look down, and see the center of… everything. Feel the gravity trying to pull her down. See the strings that kept her tethered to the Earth. She figured that a lot could be told of a person by the people they desired. And Stephanie Brown knew that she was fortunate enough to see the myriad wondrous qualities in Cassandra Cain. That she had the ability to know Cass for the wonder that she was spoke well of Stephanie herself.

And she had to reckon that that must be what love was.

But she hadn’t told anyone that she was in love with Cassandra. She hadn’t told anyone she was a lesbian at all. She had been on her way to convincing herself she was bi when she met Cassandra. She’d been going out with the current Robin Tim Drake at the time, and while Tim was a handsome, wonderful guy, kissing him was like kissing styrofoam.

The only person who knew anything about that part of her life was Batwoman Kate Kane, and she figured it out on her own.

Spoiler spared a glance at Batwoman, before looking back at the ground.

Stephanie had taken an initial hatred to Kate. She had seemed so composed and cool and everything else Stephanie wasn’t. But once Kate figured it out, she revealed to Stephanie that she was also a soppy, idiotic mess who had spent the previous two weeks trying to dissuade Wonder Woman’s attraction to her (for some reason), and failing. Thus were they equal in disaster.

“Hey, Spoiler,” Batwoman said.

Spoiler looked up.

Kate had this knack of knowing when Stephanie was down, and talking to her to keep her mind occupied on something else.

“Yeah?” Spoiler asked.

“Is Starfleet a military organization?”

Spoiler had to shake her own head to register that one.

“Diana and I are watching--”

“Yeah,” Spoiler said. “You’re watching _Star Trek. _ How deep in are you?”

_“DS9,” _ Batwoman said. “She had us skip _The Animated Series.” _

“Good call.”

“So we’re watching it,” Batwoman said, “and I bring up that Starfleet’s a military organization, and she just… looks at me funny.”

“She doesn’t think so?” Spoiler asked.

“She doesn’t. She thinks they’re just a scientific and exploratory body.”

Spoiler paused. “But.. they have warships.”

_“Right?” _

“And military ranking.”

_“That,” _Batwoman said. “That right _there. _ I told her that, and she said _‘Well, shrimp boats have captains, too.’” _

“Shrimp boats don’t have photon torpedos.”

“Shrimp boats,” Batwoman said, “don’t have_ ensigns._”

“Okay,” Batgirl said, piping up, _“Now _ what’s the score?”

“It’s nothing-nothing,” Batgirl said. “I told you a minute ago.”

Batgirl looked between the two women, who were talking about military ranking on a series of science-fiction television programs mere seconds ago, and said “It sure doesn’t _feel _ like it.”

Cassandra Cain had improved her reading, writing, and speaking considerably since the Battle of Founders Island ten months ago. More and more complete sentences were coming out of her mouth seemingly by the day. She could thank Barbara Gordon’s tutorship for that.

And it was at least one thing Stephanie Brown could feel good about tonight.

A ruffle of fabric, and the three of them looked up.

Batman descended into the alley. His boots hit the pavement hard, and the wind blew his cape back, revealing the purple lining.

“Do you always have to do that?” Batwoman asked. “It’s just us here.”

“He wants someone on the roof with him,” Batman said, electing to ignore that.

“Why?” Batwoman asked.

“He wants to see one of our faces when I supposedly fail to find the bomb. He won’t cooperate until someone goes up there”

Spoiler raised her hand. “I’ll go.”

Batman, Batwoman, and Batgirl looked at her, each one hesitating before speaking.

“Are you sure?” Batman asked.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Batwoman said. “You really don’t.”

“Of course I do,” Spoiler said. “I know him better than any of you.”

Batgirl stepped in front of her. Spoiler looked her up and down, trying to guess from her body language what she was going to do or say. Reading body language was Cass’ department though, not hers.

Finally, Batgilrl wrapped Spoiler in a hug.

“Be careful,” Batgirl said.

This was how Cassandra Cain was, even with her advancing skills in speech. She preferred to communicate nonverbally, and with Stephanie Brown, a hug was the go-to.

Spoiler narrowed her options as to what to do next down to bawling, and declaring everlasting love.

She opted to do neither.

“Thanks, Cass,” Spoiler said.

“Good luck,” Batwoman said.

“I’m safe,” Spoiler said. “You three aren’t. Keep your luck. You’re gonna need it.”

And with that, Spoiler got her grapnel gun from her utility belt. She fired it at the ledge of one of the buildings on either side of the alley, and propelled herself into the air.

At the apex of her flight, she spread her purple cape, and glided across the street, touching down on the rooftop of the Oakey Paper Building.

What awaited Spoiler on that rooftop was a six foot man in all orange. Orange bodysuit, orange boots, orange gloves, orange lower mask revealing his eyes and his long, blonde ponytail. Down either side of his chest were five ovular blue pouches that he used in lieu of a utility belt.

In between the two of them was a table and two chairs on either side.

Spoiler ran a finger across the bottom of her black mask, activating the voice scrambler.

“Who are you?” the man asked.

Spoiler’s voice came out in a lower artificial register. “Spoiler.”

“You weren’t around before I went into Arkham.”

“I’m here now,” Spoiler said. “You do your end. I’ve done mine.”

The man sighed. “Fine.”

He pushed a button on the gold wrist watch beneath his glove, and sat down at one of the chairs.

“Care for a seat?” he asked.

Spoiler’s stomach churned at the thought of sitting across from this man, but she did so. She knew what he was capable of. She was torn between not wanting to upset for fear of what he might do, and _wanting _to upset him so she could have the proper excuse to break his face.

Because the supervillain across from whom Spoiler sat had escaped from Arkham Asylum three weeks beforehand.

He was known as _“Cluemaster.” _

His real identity, however, was that of former game show host Arthur Brown.

And he was Stephanie Brown’s father.

* * *

On the first floor of the Oakey Paper Building, in the loading dock, a single Oakey Paper truck housed several bundles of dynamite that would have leveled the building, had those bundles gone off.

A red light on the tailgate of the truck, connected to the dynamite, switched off.

Meaning the detonation switch was now inactive.

And now Batman, Batwoman, and Batgirl could safely investigate the small blue-and-orange gift-wrapped box that was on the concrete floor a few feet away from the rigged truck.

“So,” Batwoman said. “Riddler leaves riddles… and Cluemaster leaves clues.”

“Correct,” Batman said.

“And he wonders why he gets caught?”

“You’d be surprised,” said Batman. “He wants to prove his superiority.”

“So does Nygma,” Batwoman said.

“Nygma has an overweening need for attention,” Batman said. “Brown just has a superiority complex. I’ve found the latter to be far more dangerous.”

He looked down at Batgirl, who was standing between them. 

“Care to do the honors?”

Batgirl nodded, and walked to the box.

The contrast between the light gray of the concrete and the consuming blackness of Batgirl’s suit and cape made it look as though the void itself was walking to the box. Batgirl bent down, took the lid off of the box… and paused.

“What is it?” Batwoman asked.

Batgirl reached in, and took out a white, cardboard box. Like one in which over-the-counter medication would have arrived at a supermarket for sale.

She walked it over to them. Batman could see the name of the medication on the box as she came.

“Pe--”

Batgirl raised a finger, cutting him off.

It seemed that Batgirl wanted to tell them what the box said herself.

Batman allowed himself a small swell of pride… but he also allowed himself a sliver of impatience.

Batwoman piped up. “It says--”

Batgirl held her finger up again, silencing her as well.

Until finally, Batgirl said:

_“Pewterol?” _

“Very good,” Batman said.

Even though Batgirl’s black mask completely covered her face, Batman could tell by how the stitching above the bridge of the nose shifted that she was smiling.

“Isn’t Pewterol a diarrhea medication?” Batwoman asked.

“It is,” said Batman, taking the Pewterol box from Batgirl.

“And… is that the clue?”

“No,” Batman said, looking it over. “This is an old box.”

He held the back up to Batwoman “It says _‘Cale-Anderson Pharmaceuticals.’” _

“That sounds… familiar,” Batwoman said.

“Cale-Anderson Pharmaceuticals has been rebranded as Anderson Pharmaceuticals for the past four years,” Batman said. “Ever since Veronica Cale went to prison, and Leslie Anderson bought out her stake in the company.”

“Right,” Batwoman said. _ “That’s _ why that name was so familiar. Veronica Cale is one of Wonder Woman’s bad guys. So, what, we have to make a phone call to whatever prison’s holding Veronica Cale?”

“No,” Batman said. “In the corporate restructuring and subsequent stock hit after Cale went to prison, Anderson Pharmaceuticals had to relocate its Gotham City headquarters to Bludhaven to save costs. It used to be the Cale-Anderson building. Now it’s the Gotham headquarters for Kord Industries.”

“And that’s where the next clue is?” Batgirl asked.

“And that’s where the next clue is,” Batman replied.

* * *

**TOP OF THE THIRD**

Tied at zero.

Game Seven of the World Series between the Gotham City Knights and the Central City Diamonds had turned into a pitching duel.

Gotham’s Ivan Ross had let one runner on in the first and two on in the second, but they were both stranded. Central City’s left-handed starter Emiliano Vega, on the other hand, had pitched two perfect innings. No runs, no hits, no errors by his own team.

Beads of sweat were forming on Ivan Ross’ brow as Central City first baseman Lionel Woodrow adjusted his batting gloves at the plate.

Woodrow wasn’t quite a mountain of a man, but few would be incorrect in classifying him as a rather large hill. Just the bulk of his arms made the stitches on his red away jersey scream like they were being tortured.

He was the most feared batter the Diamonds had. Third in the lineup, with a regular season batting average of .304, and a _terrifying _postseason average of .413, with seven solo bombs in October.

Woodrow got into his stance. One strike, one ball, with one already out

Ross got the signal from catcher Harold Levy.

He nodded…

...wound up…

...let it fly…

...and _immediately _ knew he fucked up.

He was going for the sinker that had served him well, low and inside, but his finger movement was a little off.

His sinker just didn’t _sink. _

**CRACK!**

And low, agonized moans from the almost forty-eight thousand Gotham City faithful in the stands as the ball sailed over the left field wall.

Gotham City was now down by one.

Lionel Woodrow played the heel for the crowd, taking delight in potentially robbing Gotham City of its first ever World Series title.

He flipped his bat (a dick move that would have gotten him drilled in his next at bat, were this not Game Seven), and took his jog around the bases.

Woodrow even tipped his hat to the crowd before he went back into the dugout, the evil prick.

* * *

**THE OAKEY PAPER BUILDING**

“You weren’t around the last time I was out,” Cluemaster said.

Spoiler didn’t even hesitate.

**“Shut the fuck up, Arthur.”**

The blue eyes above that orange mask of his, those eyes that Stephanie Brown shared with him, went wide.

_“Wow,” _ he said. “And crimefighters didn’t have such dirty mouths the last time I was out, either!”

“If you didn’t have control of a bomb that could kill a lot of people,” Spoiler said, “I’d beat you until you couldn’t chew food anymore.”

And only a casual inventory of her emotions at present proved to Spoiler that she really did mean it.

“But I _ do _have control of a bomb,” Cluemaster said. “You can’t do anything to me, lest I decide not to cooperate further. So you’re just going to have to listen to me talk.”

Cluemaster folded his hands behind his head, and put his feet up on the table.

“I’m guessing you’re a teenager,” Cluemaster said.

Spoiler said nothing.

“That’s how the Bat operates,” Cluemaster said. “Child soldiers. So if you’re a teenager… You were alive when _ Price Change _was still on the air.”

Not only had Stephanie Brown been alive when _Price Change, _ the game show that Arthur Brown used to host, had been on the air, Arthur had even taken Stephanie to a taping when she was six.

Stephanie had been in Arthur’s dressing room during the shows. They taped four half-hour episodes in a given day. And that was so long for little Stephanie to wait for someone to take her to the bathroom. And… well… she had an accident. As six-year-olds were often known to have.

Arthur entered the dressing room with his entourage when the tapings were finished. Stephanie had tears in her eyes, and she said she was sorry.

He excused his entourage, at which point he locked the dressing room door, and made Stephanie take off her shoes and socks, and stand in the puddle she had made for a solid hour.

Arthur threatened to knock Stephanie’s teeth down her throat if she stepped out of her mess before the hour was up.

And if she told anyone about what he was making her do, Arthur threatened to do the same to Stephanie’s mother.

Indeed, Arthur Brown visited his feelings of fury and frustration on mother and daughter alike. Not long after this event, Arthur pushed his wife Crystal down the stairwell of the apartment building in which they lived at the time. Crystal Brown fractured her hip, leading to an addiction to painkillers that plagued her to this very day.

Stephanie Brown pitied her mother. But she couldn’t help but remember the times that Crystal just stood by and let Arthur hurt her.

Her pity only went so far.

“I was the host,” Cluemaster said. “I was the host of that show.”

Stephanie had been saving up what she was about to say for _years. _

“So what you’re saying,” Spoiler said, “is that you’re not just a cheap knock-off of The Riddler, you’re a cheap knock-off of Bob Barker, too?”

Cluemaster glared at her. “Kids these days have no taste.”

“And adults these days have no decency,” Spoiler said. “So get fucked.”

* * *

**THE KORD INDUSTRIES BUILDING**

Kord Industries was a research and development firm that specialized in automotive innovation. The Batmobile that Batman drove had more than a few gizmos that were held under Kord Industries patents.

The company was owned by Ted Kord, who had once operated under the superhero _nom-de-guerre “Blue Beetle.” _ Ted had since retired, passing on the mantle to a young man named Jaime Reyes, and Batman thought that Mister Reyes had done an admirable job of meeting the high standard Ted had set.

Not that he’d actually tell anyone that, of course.

So as Batman, Batwoman, and Batgirl stood on the roof of the parking garage across from the Kord Industries Building just off of Tricorner on the mainland, Batman told the other two what was missing from this picture.

“The police,” Batman said. “If Cluemaster leaves a mysterious package, someone would have called the cops in case it was a bomb.”

Just then, a voice sounded in his cowl.

“Penny-One to Batman.”

It was Alfred.

“Batman here.”

“Receiving an incoming transmission, sir,” Alfred said.

“I have a feeling I know who it is,” Batman said. “Patch it through, and thank you. Batman out.”

A small blip of static, and a familiar voice came in.

_“G’Day, Bruce!” _

Batman glowered. Ted had seen that _Monty Python _ sketch with the Australians, and that was how he said hello to him every… single… time.

Batwoman looked at Batgirl quizzically and mouthed _“G’Day Bruce?” _

“Good evening, Ted,” Batman said.

“It appears I have a goody for you,” Ted said. “I convinced the downstairs receptionist not to call the cops. I figured you’d appreciate contaminant-free evidence.”

“Thank you,” Batman said. “What are you doing in Gotham?”

“You, uh… You didn’t notice my name on the building?”

Batman didn’t have anything to say to that.

“Christ,” Ted said. “I figure Selina would have porked a sense of humor into you by now.”

Batwoman at least had the decency to cover her mouth before he giggled. Batgirl just went straight to open-mouthed cackling.

The revolving door at the main entrance of the Kord Industries Building spat out Ted Kord himself in a navy blue suit, holding his phone to his ear, and a blue and orange gift-wrapped box in his hands.

From this distance, Batman thought Ted looked a little thicker around the midsection than the last time he saw him.

Ted set the box down in front of the door.

“There you go,” Ted said as he moved his phone to his hand. “It’s all yours. Fun talking to you. You see Booster, tell him he still owes me twenty bucks.”

“Tell him yours--”

Ted had already hung up, and re-entered the building.

“I’ll get it,” Batwoman said.

She used her cape to glide down to ground level. She opened the box and took a second to look inside. Then she removed the clue, threw the box in the nearby trash can, and grapneled back up to the top of the parking garage.

“It’s a bayonet,” Batwoman said, before handing it to Batman.

That it was. It appeared to be old, and army-issued, with black stains along its twelve inches of steel.

“Scanning,” Batman said, before the forensic lenses dropped down over the eye-holes in his cowl. A few seconds of scanning, a few seconds more to wait for the results, and…

“The black stains are blood,” Batman said. “O-Positive. Aged sixty-to-seventy years.”

“If I didn’t know any better,” Batwoman said, “I’d say that that bayonet was used in the Korean War.”

* * *

**BOTTOM OF THE FIFTH**

Central City still leading Gotham one to nothing, as God-tier pitching made the innings fly by.

While Diamonds pitcher Emiliano Vega had still held the Knights scoreless to this point, the perfection of his pitching had come to an end at the last at bat. Eighth in Gotham’s batting order, Center Fielder Jimmy Dayton, managed to make a double off of an error from Central City Left Fielder Waldo Reese.

Which meant that, for the first time in the evening, Gotham City had a runner on second base, right there in scoring position.

But there was a genuine, uneasy tenor floating around the thousands upon thousands of Knights fans in the stands of Wayne Stadium, hundreds of whom had turned their Knights caps inside out, trying to wring every last bit of luck they could out of old fan traditions.

Gotham had two outs.

And up to the plate stepped Gotham City Shortstop, number 4, Linus Watkins.

Linus was not known for his power hitting. Or his hitting at all, quite frankly. He was an better-tahn-average fielder, but held a paltry average of .214 during the regular season.

Knights General Manager Diego Aguayo wouldn’t have put Watkins on the roster for this game at all, had the Knights’ starting Shortstop, Pierre Malloy, not broken his thumb in a successful attempt to make a diving catch in Game Five.

Linus Watkins had a habit of being too greedy in his swings.

Like right now.

Strike One.

Linus could feel Diego glaring daggers into his back from the dugout without even looking at him. It had been drilled again and again into his head that he shouldn’t go for pitches that look like balls.

But Emiliano Vega wasn’t throwing balls. He was painting the corners of the strike-zone like the Cy Young contender he was supposed to be.

Like this one. A splitter high and inside.

Strike Two.

Zero balls and two strikes on two pitches.

_Jesus... _

Linus Watkins had never felt more like a Little Leaguer in over his head than he did right now.

He adjusted his gloves, got in his stance, and waited for his inevitable fate.

But in his swing on this third pitch, he twisted his ankle. His swing was off, and he put too much power behind it.

He was gonna--

**BA-DOOM!**

The four-seam fastball that would have confounded Linus Watkins on literally any other day, instead, in this instant, cracked off of his bat during the mistake he made. 

Gotham City’s long-suffering fans made noise that swelled into thunder as the product of Linus Watkins’ mistake went back…

_...back… _

...GONE OVER THE LEFT FIELD WALL!

Linus hadn’t moved. The home plate umpire had to remind him to drop his bat and take his run around the bases.

His third home run of the season (and sixth of his major league career) brought in both himself and the runner on second.

And put the Gotham City Knights up two to one…

* * *

**THE OAKEY PAPER BUILDING**

Spoiler heard a roar off in the distance, like the waves coming in, but higher.

From fifteen blocks away, she couldn’t actually see Wayne Stadium through the maze of downtown skyscrapers.

But she could see the _light _ from Wayne Stadium, reaching up to the sky, as though it were rays of heaven coming from the Earth, trying to find their way home.

Apparently the Knights were winning.

Cass would be thrilled.

“Do you know why I do it?” Cluemaster asked.

Spoiler looked at him.

“The costume,” he said. “The gimmick. You know why?”

“I don’t give a shit why you do anything, besides shutting the fuck up until Batman finds that bomb,” Spoiler said.

Cluemaster just rolled his eyes.

“I hosted a show,” he said “where people won prizes for knowing the price differentials on toaster ovens. Tubs of cream cheese. Bottles of conditioner. They won new cars and trips to Aruba while putting in as little effort as humanly possible. And they called that glory.”

Spoiler said nothing as Cluemaster folded his arms.

“It wasn’t about the money,” he said. “It wasn’t about fame. I had both of those. Nice car, nice apartment, nice family.”

Spoiler felt the urge to tell him to go fuck himself, and she didn’t know why she was fighting it off.

“But what I _didn’t _ have was _glory,” _ Cluemaster said. “It was just handed out to people on the street for no reason whatsoever. And they had the nerve to look _proud! _ Like they _accomplished something!” _

Cluemaster brought his feet off the table, and fixed Spoiler with a glare that had an ambience of madness to it.

“It got to the point that I just… just couldn’t take it anymore. If these… _ people _… want their order, they’re just going to have to work for it. They’re going to have to work just as hard as I do for as little thanks as I get.”

He tapped his finger on the table three times.

“They’re going to have to follow the clues.”

Cluemaster stared into the eyes of Spoiler’s mask, before he leaned back again, and put his feet on the table.

“Your judgement doesn’t interest me,” Cluemaster said. “I can smell it coming off of you, and it’s all worthless. Because I know… I just _know… _ that you’ve seen it. You’ve seen someone walk away with something they didn’t deserve. Something that belonged to you.”

Spoiler stopped herself mid-eyeroll.

As much as it felt like agonizing death to admit, even if only to herself, Stephanie Brown had seen one such a person.

And his name was Conner Kent.

Conner _ “Superboy” _ Kent was Cassandra Cain’s boyfriend. He’d been on Cassandra’s brain ever since she found out he was interested in him at Bruce and Selina’s wedding. The two shared their first kiss at the Battle of Founders Island ten months ago, and they’d been official ever since.

Watching all of this unfold was slow torture for Stephanie, no matter how much she tried to convince herself that Cassandra’s happiness was the only thing that mattered.

Because the thing was, when she thought that, she didn’t think Cassandra would actually _ get _ there.

Since she started dating Conner, Cass started smiling a whole lot more. Stephanie would catch her just staring off into space with an ever-growing grin, and Stephanie knew that she was thinking of him. Conner Kent got her into baseball. Cassandra had spent the last six months wearing a white cowboy hat that Conner had gotten her on a Young Justice mission in Texas.

But the worst part?

Conner was actually a great person. He treated Cassandra extraordinarily well, and he was a fun person to hang around with.

Stephanie liked him.

The guy couldn’t even _suck _ properly.

And seeing Cassandra grin absent-mindedly to herself, knowing that it wasn’t Stephanie herself that made her smile like that, just felt like digesting broken glass.

“There,” Cluemaster said, and Spoiler came back to Earth.

“You _have _ seen it,” Cluemaster said. “And now you’re in a goofy costume fighting crime. Hate to use the oldest tool in the supervillain’s shed, but… We’re not so different, you and I.”

Spoiler knew that she had let him into her head. And even if it were for a mere instant, she hated herself for it.

“I’m not trying to murder innocent people,” Spoiler said. “We’re night and day.”

* * *

**THE GOTHAM CITY KOREAN WAR MUSEUM**

This place on the still-under-construction Founders Island was closed for the night. Batgirl, Batman, and Batwoman had come in through the vents.

To Batgirl, the museum looked like… a museum. It was old, it was dusty, and it was run down. There were ancient pictures everywhere, and mannequins in faded vintage soldier outfits

As Batman and Batwoman scanned almost every surface within the small, cramped museum, Batgirl walked by herself among the plaques and exhibits with one thought on her mind.

She could be watching the game right now.

Baseball was not Cassandra Cain’s first foray into sports, but it was the first successful one. Kate had tried to get her into MMA, but Cassandra had found the sport tedious. It took a few bouts for her to realize that the men and women fighting in the octagon would not stand a chance in Hell against her. Watching people exude so much effort to perform a task that she herself could do in her sleep was something Cassandra found laughably dull.

But baseball was a different story.

Cassandra had been hooked on baseball ever since Conner had showed her slowed-down footage of Gotham City Knights pitcher Delbert Givens throw something called a _“knuckleball.” _

The ball left his hand, and made a winding, jagged, unpredictable journey to the glove of catcher Harold Levy. 

She had watched that footage again… and again… and again. And this girl who could predict the moves of henchmen and supervillains before they had even made them simply by reading their body language had to ask, in sheer awe:

_How did he do that? _

She and Conner had watched the first six games of the World Series in the Clock Tower. Sitting there on the couch in one of the rooms on the second floor, her arm around his waist, his around her shoulders. Just sitting there in rapt quietude as the games unfolded.

And she was missing it.

Because of Stephanie’s asshole father.

Batgirl stopped at one of the plaques in front of the exhibit. With nothing better to do while Batman and Batwoman continued their investigation, she tried to read what the plaque said:

...and felt the sting of irritation when she could not.

In addition to simple illiteracy, Cassandra Cain suffered from dyslexia. Letters popped up in the wrong places, and sometimes even moved when she blinked.

One of the things that helped her was that she could at least remember the _shape _of a word or a letter. If she knew what a circle was, if she could identify the silhouette of an elephant, then she could remember the shape of a word like _“There,” _ or _“It.” _

The problem with this, however, was that there were so _many _ shapes in which a given word could appear.

Babs called them _“fonts.” _

And Jumping Fucking Jesus, did Cassandra loathe fonts with every fiber of her being.

Look at the words on the plaque that Batgirl was standing in front of. The letters were all the same size and scrunched together, like train cars in various stages of construction. How could people _read _ this shit?

Batgirl ran her fingers along the words on the plaque, and…

...and…

_Oh. _

One of the words had been scratched out. And in the wound upon this metal plaque was a black, powdery substance that looked an awful lot like the stains on the bayonet that they had gotten from Kord Industries.

Batgirl took a deep breath, and got her words in order.

“Guys? I found something!”

Batman and Batwoman came to her location, and Batgirl pointed to the scratched out word.

The lenses on Batman’s cowl came down, and Batgirl knew that he was doing his detective stuff. After a second, the lenses went back up.

“It’s the same blood from the bayonet,” Batman said.

Batgirl pointed to the plaque, and got her words in order again.

“What does it say?”

“It’s a song called _ ‘The Marines’ Hymn,’” _ Batwoman said. “Members of the United States Marine Corps sing it at formal events.”

Batwoman ran her finger along the plaque as she spoke the words aloud.

_“‘From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of…’” _

She pointed at the scratched out word.

_“‘Tripoli,’” _Batwoman said.

“Tripoli?” Batgirl asked.

“It’s the capital of Libya,” said Batwoman. “It’s a country in northern Africa.”

Batman had the holographic display on his gauntlet up and running. “I’m cross-referencing GCPD reports with the Libyan Embassy back on the mainland, but… so… far…”

He stopped talking.

And at once, Batgirl was afraid.

She was afraid because the whole of his body, the way he stood, his wide eyes, his hanging jaw, told her that _Batman _ was afraid.

And Batman was never supposed to be afraid.

Batgirl’s horror mounted as she realized that she was no longer looking at Batman.

She was looking at a terrified Bruce Wayne in Batman’s clothes.

And when he spoke again, he spoke softly.

“Kate… What’s the score?”

* * *

**TOP OF THE EIGHTH**

Gotham still leads two-one.

After seven innings, allowing five hits and only one run, Ivan Ross was called off the mound. All forty-seven thousand strong roared their approval for his valiant effort.

Metallica’s _Enter Sandman _ started playing on the Wayne Stadium soundsystem.

A video package began to play out on the high-definition video board.

And the Gotham City faithful started stamping their feet.

Because they knew what was coming.

Onto the field stepped a man in a Knights uniform. He was almost deathly scrawny, as though one could pick him up by his head and stir their coffee with him. Jagged tufts of unruly red hair stuck out from beneath his blue Knights ballcap.

This… was Gotham’s Closing Pitcher.

He had an alarming fastball, the highest speed of which during this, his rookie year, had been clocked at one-hundred-three miles an hour. He had a curveball so pretty, whose arc was so perfect, that video footage of it could be played on a never-ending loop at the Louvre.

And his change-up, clocking in the mid-eighties, was… just… _ filthy! _

He had a regular season ERA of 1.98, with thirty-nine saves to his name.

His postseason ERA? _ 0.88! _ No one on Earth could accuse him of choking in October.

This was it. It was over. Gotham City was going to win its first World Series.

Number 18, Gotham’s Closer, Edward Everett Easton, continued his walk to the mound.

And the crowd chanted his nickname

**_“TRIPLE-E! TRIPLE-E! TRIPLE-E!”_ **

During that long walk, during that chant, a great peace veined throughout a great energy passed from person to person among the crowd.

For the nearly-forty-eight thousand in the stands were not the only ones there.

Almost every one of them flattered themselves that they were in the company of generations of soon-to-be-sated ghosts of fans past. People who had stood by this team throughout every fuck-up and distaster it had endured, going all the way back to 1946. Moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, friends and lovers, all keeping the faith, all speaking the oft-intoned mantra of _ “Wait till next year,” _until they could wait no longer. Passing beyond the veil before the team they loved could win it all.

And… it was _more _ than that.

People say that baseball is slow.

People are often fools.

What baseball is, is _ leisurely. _ It holds the capacity for conversation, for debate, for shared remembrance, for bonds to grow among the people who watch it.

For the fans in the stands, for the ones watching the scoreboard outside who couldn’t get tickets, for the fans watching in bars, for the people at home, they all loved the same thing. They all had a common point of identification. They talked to people that they never would have spared a second glance otherwise. They connected through this thing that held their hearts.

The dividing lines between genders, between races, between religions, between classes, they still mattered.

But they didn’t matter as much.

Because they all wanted the same thing. They were all proud of the same thing.

They wanted something that could take its own small place in some kind of history. That proved that Gotham City was more than just a haven for costumed wackos. That Gotham City was more than just Batman.

Gotham City was a place that could be admired. It could be a place where something was built.

Even if it was only, after all, just a collection of men who were really good at a game that children played.

As Edward Everett _“Triple-E” _ Easton stepped to the m--

* * *

**THE OAKEY PAPER BUILDING**

The shockwave knocked Spoiler and Cluemaster out of their chairs, overturning the table, before Spoiler could hear the explosion.

And as she struggled to pick herself up, Spoiler had to concentrate to hear past the ringing in her ears.

She finally stood and saw Cluemaster, her father, standing at the ledge of the building, looking out at what had happened.

Spoiler could see an enormous column of smoke, dust, and debris through the webwork of skyscrapers from about fifteen blocks away.

With a certainty every last bit as towering as the dread she felt, she knew what had happened.

Wayne Stadium just… wasn’t there anymore.

Her stomach roiled. Her pulse roared in her temples.

“What… did you… do?”

And past the ringing in her ears, she could hear her father softly say:

“He was supposed to stop me.”

Cluemaster turned to her, his silhouette cut against the dust cloud from the destroyed Wayne Stadium. The wind was blowing this way. It would be here soon.

And as Spoiler regained her hearing, she could hear the car alarms in the street below. The windows that were still in the process of shattering.

Then, there was the _screaming. _ The low, baleful _screaming. _ The kind of screaming done in sorrow instead of pain. In came from below the Oakey Paper Building and into Spoiler’s ears like a blanket of pin-pricks. As if the sensation of one’s foot falling asleep could make a sound.

And Arthur _ “Cluemaster” _ Brown had the fucking nerve to stand there looking horrified at what he had just done.

Stephanie Brown had always hated her father. But that hate didn’t drive her, and didn’t fuel her. It just acted as the foundation upon which she tried to build her better self.

But it was never exorcised. Never dealt with. There it stayed, at the bottom of everything.

And it tore through the kindness and the strength and the humanity she had erected in herself, and assumed the form of boiling and all-consuming rage.

“WHAT DID YOU DO?”

Spoiler could see the tears streaming down her father’s face as she tore toward him.

“This isn’t my fault!” he said. “Batman was supposed to stop me! HE WAS SUPPOSED TO FOLLOW THE CLUES!”

Spoiler punched him in the face. She swore she could hear his nose break as he collapsed.

She knelt down, planting a knee on his chest, and started raining lefts and rights to the face of the sobbing, babbling, bleeding mess beneath her.

Spoiler couldn’t have said how long she did this before she heard the crack.

The Oakey Paper Building was old. And it had foundation problems to begin with.

The shockwave from the Wayne Stadium explosion had not helped matters any.

And the entire building pitched forward about three feet.

Spoiler was flung to her right. Cluemaster was thrown over her.

Past the ledge.

She sprang to all fours to see her father hanging off the edge of the slanting building by one hand. He was starting to slip…

...and Spoiler grabbed her father’s hand just in time.

“DON’T LET ME FALL!” Cluemaster screamed as he dangled off the edge. “DEAR GOD, DON’T LET ME FALL!”

She held on tight with both hands. She attempted to summon the strength into her legs, into her arms, into her core, to pull him up.

And that’s when she heard the voice.

Did it seem louder than the explosion because it was?

Or did it seem louder because she knew it was her own voice speaking to her, using her own brain to turn itself up to a deafening volume?

**LET HIM FALL.**

It was strong. It was authoritative. And it held the pell mell seduction of saying something that Stephanie Brown wanted to hear.

Spoiler’s legs turned to jelly. Her arms felt so, _so _ sore!

“I’M SLIPPING!” Cluemaster yelled.

Sure enough, she heard the wet squeak of her bloody leather gloves loosening around his hand.

“DON’T LET ME GO!” Cluemaster cried. “DON’T L--”

Cluemaster’s hand slipped from Spoiler’s grasp.

And Arthur Brown screamed on the way to his death.

Spoiler had a good view of it from twenty stories up. His head collided with a parking meter just before the rest of his body slammed into the concrete of the sidewalk. The contents within were emptied in a violent red and pink shower.

She rose to her feet, feeling numb.

As Spoiler stared at her father’s mangled, nearly headless body below, the rage she had felt departed from her, leaving behind a vacuum.

But that vacuum was slowly replaced by a black, gloppy horror.

She now had to ask herself the very same question that she had posed to her father minutes before.

_What did I _ do?

In so many ways, nothing would ever be the same again. The hope she held for everything to somehow get better, even if it needed a little elbow grease to get it on its way, vanished. What came next, integrating seamlessly, was the bone deep knowledge that now everything… _everything… _ was terrible.

The cloud of dust from the Wayne Stadium explosion had come upon this area of Gotham now. Spoiler’s mask had built-in gas mask capabilities, so she wasn’t worried about anything as trivial and miniscule as her own well-being at present.

She looked up.

The buildings surrounding the Oakey Paper Building were invisible now, coated in a dark haze. She could see only vaguely perceptible impressions of them, like tiny fingers beneath a thick blanket.

She got her grapnel gun off of her utility belt…

...and took this opportunity to disappear into the fog.

* * *

It was academic, at this juncture, to speculate on precisely _how _ Arthur Brown rigged the Shadow Density bomb that destroyed Wayne Stadium. But time passes from even the most horrific of tragedies, and academics were academics for a reason.

It was theorized that the detonator was placed beneath the pitcher’s mound, and was activated when the high definition video board in center field played the video package that heralded Edward Everett Easton’s arrival on the field. From there, the pressure when Easton stepped on the mound detonated the bomb.

It wasn’t just the 47,515 fans in the stands. It wasn’t just the players, the management, the umpires, the grounds crew, the ownership for both teams in the skyboxes. It wasn’t just the sports press, the vendors, the security, the custodial and maintenance staff.

It was the thousands of people outside Wayne Stadium who couldn’t get a ticket, watching the outside scoreboard light up as the innings passed.

It was the thousands of people in the bars and restaurants and shops around Wayne Stadium, waiting for the game to be over.

It was the people in the Hilton hotel two blocks away.

In what would be known in both the American colloquial lexicon as well as history textbooks printed for generations to come as _“Game Seven,” _ the Shadow Density bomb did not just destroy Wayne Stadium, but it also destroyed most of the four blocks surrounding it.

And the final death toll of Game Seven?

62,118.

To put this number in perspective, this was almost ten thousand more than the list of American soldiers who died throughout the duration of the Vietnam War. This was ten-point-eight percent of the population of the state of Wyoming.

In one fell swoop, Arthur _“Cluemaster” _ Brown became both the most lethal supervillain and the most prolific terrorist in the history of planet Earth.

The following months would bring attempted legislation in Washington DC to incur stiffer federal penalties for supervillain activities in America. The bill passed the House of Representatives, but was shot down in the Senate by two Senators who cited free speech concerns.

Why yes, those two Senators were, in fact, beneficiaries of hefty donations to their re-election campaigns by both Lex Luthor and LexCorp. Why on Earth do you ask?

If one were to ask whether or not the increased social antipathy towards supervillains extended to their heroic counterparts, the answer would be no. And for one specific reason.

Roughly an hour after Game Seven, Gotham City resident Hang Nguyen uploaded cell phone footage she had captured from the bedroom window of her apartment to YouTube.

The video had no sound, but it clearly showed an obscure Gotham City vigilante known as _“Spoiler” _ dropping Arthur _“Cluemaster” _Brown to his death. Body language experts pored over this footage in the months and years that followed, trying to discern Spoiler’s intent.

But the American zeitgeist had been known, from time to time, to assign motive to actions that mirrored its own mental state. 

And so it became common knowledge and accepted irresponsibly as fact that Spoiler _meant _ to drop Arthur Brown to his death.

Because in this one instance, if not any other, people needed to believe that the good guy killed the bad guy who hurt them.

In the December that followed Game Seven, _Catco Magazine _ published its annual list of the most popular superheroes, as voted upon in a reader poll.

Kong Kenan, the _“New Super-Man of China,” _came in fifth. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman came in fourth, third, and second respectively.

But it was Spoiler, who had never even charted in the top fifty during her preceding three calendar years of eligibility, that came in first.

And it wasn’t even close.

For what it was worth, Central City managed to rebuild its baseball team in the wake of Game Seven. The remaining ownership convened in the following days, and put out a press release saying that they would partake in a replacement draft, saying that the love that Central City had for their team mattered above all else. They would come back, and better than ever.

Central City had The Flash as their superhero.

Central City was that kind of town.

But Gotham City wasn’t. The remaining board for Ace Chemical, who owned the Gotham City Knights franchise, also convened. After weeks of deliberation and public polling, Ace Chemical finally sold all applicable rights and trademarks back to Major League Baseball.

Gotham had come so close, only for near-incomprehensible pain to be visited upon them. 

Their heart simply wasn’t in it anymore.

For the first time since 1946, Gotham City was without a professional baseball team.

So what was once axiom that became conventional wisdom, was now incontrovertible fact.

Gotham City will never win a World Series.

* * *

**GOTHAM CENTRAL PRECINCT**

“I don’t blame you for this,” Commissioner James Gordon said. “If you could have stopped it, you would have. I don’t blame you, neither does anyone downstairs, neither does anyone in this city.”

Batman was standing across from him on the roof of the brand new Gotham Central building on Founders Island. This had been the place that Harmonia, and then Nemesis in Harmonia’s body, had centered their attempts to destroy the Multiverse ten months beforehand.

Wayne Stadium had been destroyed eight hours ago. The sun was about to come up.

And Batman could see the encroaching light struggle through the haze of dust that still hung over the mainland.

“I want to show you something,” Batman said.

He brought up the holographic imager on his gauntlet, and showed the phone footage of Spoiler dropping Cluemaster to his doom beneath the Oakey Paper Building.

When it was over, he turned it off and looked at Gordon.

“What did you see?” Batman asked.

Gordon was quiet for a moment, before he asked “What did _you _ see?”

Batman had tried to deduce some kind of intent from Spoiler’s actions on the video. He had showed the footage to Cassandra Cain, who was an expert in body language, and even she was stumped.

“I don’t know,” Batman said. “I don’t know if she dropped him on purpose, or she just couldn’t bring him back up onto the roof.”

“If she failed?” Gordon asked.

“I’m not happy about it,” Batman said. “The world needed to see Arthur Brown inside a courtroom. That’s how this is supposed to work. Superheroes aren’t meant to deal out judgement. The people are. And if Spoiler tried and failed, then… then I don’t like to admit that I’ve been there, but I have.”

“And… if she dropped him on purpose?”

Batman felt his stomach drop.

“Then she has to be brought to justice,” he said. “There’s no other way.”

Gordon closed his eyes and sighed.

“Let’s say we arrest Spoiler tomorrow,” said Gordon. “You think the Gotham DA is gonna prosecute? Would _ anyone _ in the DA’s office after this? And if there’s someone who will, are there twelve souls in this city--in this _world-- _who would convict her?”

“I refuse to believe that,” Batman said.

Gordon put his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. “Batman… we need you and people like you not to kill. But… But there are days where we really wouldn’t mind.”

Batman narrowed his eyes. “Is this one of those days?”

Gordon’s face was unreadable. Batman felt something in the relationship between himself and Jim Gordon shift forever. Maybe not for the better, maybe not for the worse, but something had unmistakably changed..

“If you see Spoiler,” Gordon said, “tell her I think she’s doing a _ terrific _job.”

* * *

In the early part of his supervillain career, Arthur Brown flattered himself that he would train his young daughter Stephanie in the tricks of the trade, so that she might one day accompany him as his sidekick.

He even had a name picked out for her.

_“The Pointer.” _

Jesus H. Christ…

That didn’t happen, but he did show Stephanie some tricks.

How to forge documents, for one.

And the locations of all his safehouses, for another.

Spoiler found this one safehouse untouched in the basement of an abandoned factory on Bleake Island’s Mycroft Avenue. She shed her costume, showered, and got into some of her dad’s clothes that he had had on hand. They were too big for her, but she could at least wear them.

As soon as she was clean and clothed, Stephanie posed for two separate photos in front of the backgrounds at the rear of the safehouse. These would be the photos for the driver’s license and passport of Natalie Venora.

Stephanie could pick out new names as well.

She had clothes packed in one suitcase, and she even had thirty thousand dollars of petty cash on hand from the supply that her late father had stored in this basement.

Documents made, luggage ready, Stephanie almost absent-mindedly looked at her phone.

She had three voicemails.

One was from Kate.

One was from Selina.

For the briefest instant, she thought…

_Hey! My two moms called! _

...and wondered why.

But it was the third message that caught her attention.

It was from Cass.

Cass was not one to leave voicemail messages, as Cass could barely talk.

Knowing full well what it might do to her, she clicked on Cass’ message, and put the phone to her ear..

Breathing.

Just breathing.

Stephanie closed her eyes, getting lost in it, before Cassandra Cain’s familiar bass sounded just one word.

“Steph?”

More breathing, for warm eons that felt over in a moment.

“Come home… Please?”

A couple of seconds of silence before the message ended.

Stephanie took the phone away from her ear, tears stinging her eyes.

In the hours that had passed since the destruction of Wayne Stadium, Stephanie Brown had examined every part of her motivations and state of mind surrounding the events that led to her father’s death.

The same questions that the world was asking about her were the ones she had been asking herself.

Did Arthur Brown fall from the roof of the Oakey Paper Building?

Or did Stephanie drop him?

Even now, she didn’t know.

And she wasn’t confident that she ever would.

She remembered the authoritative version of her own voice sounding in her head.

**LET HIM FALL.**

Her stomach curdled just thinking about it. But it couldn’t be that simple, could it? Just a version of herself overriding her own belief system and allowing her to kill a man?

Cassandra Cain had been raised by her father David from the moment of her birth to be an assassin in the service of the League of Assassins, led by Ra’s al Ghul. She had actually killed a man when she was nine, and so horrified by what she had done, she had fled, spending years homeless on the streets until Bruce Wayne took her in.

She had worked so hard to come back from that. She built her entire identity on not only never taking another life, but making sure no one else did either.

So the fact of the matter was, if Stephanie Brown could not look the woman that she loved in the eye, and tell her beyond any reasonable doubt that she wasn’t a murderer, then…

...then that was it, wasn’t it?

Stephanie Brown wiped the drives on all of the computers before she left the safehouse, lighting out for parts unknown.

She’d destroy her phone at the airport.

* * *

**WAYNE MANOR**

It had been a full day since Game Seven. The first sundown since sixty-two thousand people died.

Selina Wayne didn’t leave Wayne Manor during all of this time. She had spent a sleepless night watching news broadcasts.

After a few hours of this, she had opted to listen to the radio to clean her brain out, but even then, they were filled with newscasts. The country station, hip-hop, classic rock, top forty, all of them were running news. Some of them were even running the same reports at the same time.

Arthur Brown had murdered thousands of people and shattered the identity of a city, but an event less-known, little-remarked upon, but no less unkind, was that Cluemaster had robbed Gotham City of its music.

Batman had opted to call everyone in his network in, letting the first responders do their jobs. He said that at this moment, Gotham needed to see Gotham take care of itself.

But Selina knew the truth.

Her husband was broken.

In the evening hours, she activated the Grandfather clock in the study, got onto the elevator behind it, and descended into the Batcave.

Selina found Bruce sitting in front of the wide, immense screen of the Batcomputer, looking at surveillance and news feeds from around the city.

For this second night, Oracle was acting as dispatch for Batwoman, Robin, and Bluebird on their patrols. All of the Kryptonian superheroes were in Gotham City now, using their X-Ray Vision to look for potential survivors. Kara, and Karen, and Conner. Hell, even Clark took time off from he and Lois’ newborn twins Jon and Lara to come in and help.

She could feel the emotion coming off of her husband as he sat there, stock still, looking at the monitor.

Selina knew Bruce well enough to know that he blamed himself for this.

Batman was supposed to protect Gotham City, and Batman had failed to do so. It was as simple as that to him, even though he hadn’t said it.

And Batman was still a man, after all. He was just as subject to the depression and sorrow that Game Seven wrought as anyone else.

Maybe even more so.

But Selina was simple in some ways. She blamed the motherfucker who tore the heart out of Gotham City with a bomb. And if she had to place ancillary bad-luck blame, it would have been on the pitchers for the two baseball teams. If it had been a higher-scoring game, it would have gone on longer, and Batman would have gotten there in time.

Selina softly walked up behind Bruce, and wrapped her arms around him. Her right hand crept beneath the black t-shirt he was wearing, coming to a stop over the skin of his chest.

She felt Bruce needed someone to touch him, if for no other reason than to make him feel less alone.

“Take whatever time you need, Sailor,” Selina said. “We’ll all be waiting for you.”

Bruce didn’t speak. Didn’t look at her.

But he reached up, and placed his hand over the part of his shirt that covered hers.

And as Selina kissed his temple and stepped away, she thought that that was enough.

She saw Alfred standing plaintively in the study as she emerged back into Wayne Manor proper.

“Is he…”

“Predictable,” Selina said.

“Master Bruce hasn’t eaten,” Alfred said.

She walked up to him, and placed her hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll take care of that,” Selina said. “You get some rest.”

Alfred opened his mouth to argue, apparently realized that such a venture would be fruitless, and simply nodded.

“Thank you,” he said, before departing.

And as he left, Selina Wayne thought that now would be a just dandy time for a drink.

There was a lounge in the east wing of the manor, a little out of the way room that felt more like a nook than an actual room. In this entire grandiose dungeon of a house, this was her favorite room.

And it surprised Selina to see that, when she entered this lounge, Cassandra Cain was already there. Just sitting on a stool, staring at the bar, lost in her own thoughts.

Selina had asked Cass why she had opted out of tonight’s patrol when she was usually so eager to get into her Batgirl costume and roundhouse fools until they forgot how to count.

Cassandra had paused, and said in the kind of complete sentence that was becoming her new normal:

_“I want to be here when Steph comes back.” _

And Selina couldn’t help but think _Me too, kid. _

Stephanie Brown was Selina Wayne’s protege and sidekick. She was so like Selina that it caused recognition, but just different enough that it didn’t cause revulsion.

Steph had sought Selina’s approval more so than she had Bruce’s. She was always bright, always cheerful, and never wavered from the path. On some days, Selina could convince herself that Stephanie Brown was a reflection of Selina’s best qualities.

Stephanie looked at Selina and saw a hero, not an ex-supervillain.

And Selina loved her for it.

Selina felt the need to know that she existed, reflected in the behaviors and actions of others. She got the most driven and dedicated man on the face of the planet to marry her, and she got a perfectly normal teenage girl to look up to her.

She walked behind the bar, and took down a bottle of Jack Daniels and a shot glass.

There were better whiskeys than Jack in Selina’s estimation, but Jack reached her definition of _“humility booze.” _ When you had a shitty day, you could either drink the good stuff in hopes the day would get better… or you could drink Jack, because why fight it?

As she took the cap off the bottle of Jack, she saw that book that Cassandra always carried around.

_The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. _

It was a brick of a thing, and on occasion, she could catch Cass thumbing through it, looking at the tight columns of letters.

Selina knew what she was thinking. Cassandra Cain was learning to read, and as soon as she was ready, she’d open that damn book and tear in.

_This, _Selina thought, _is the successor. _

This past Christmas, Bruce had told her that he wanted Cassandra to be his eventual replacement as Batman. Selina had balked at the idea initially. It was absurd to her that a girl who couldn’t read, write, or talk would replace the World’s Greatest Detective.

But Cass was learning to read, and she was learning fast. Now all that was left within Selina was a shameful twinge of jealousy that Bruce had something to pass into the future, and she didn’t.

Selina poured the Jack Daniels into the shot glass…

...and slowly slid the glass over to Cassandra.

Cass snapped out of her reverie, looked at the whiskey, and then looked at Selina with wide eyes.

“It’s okay,” Selina said. “It’s been a shitty day, and we have the math to back it up. Bruce doesn’t have to know.”

Cassandra weighed her options for a moment, before she nodded.

Selina poured herself one.

_“Salud,” _ she said.

Cassandra nodded.

And down the hatch they went.

Cassandra had the utmost look of disgust on her face as she shuddered.

“I know,” Selina said as Cassandra gagged and coughed. “I know.”

Once Cassandra had stilled herself, Selina took it upon herself to… clear the air.

“Stephanie is in love with you,” Selina said. “You know that, right?”

The look of shock on Cassandra’s still red face told Selina that she did not, in fact, know that.

“It’s true,” Selina said. “She looks at you the same way Conner does. The same way Kate looks at Diana. The same way I look at Bruce. Smart as you are in the ways of body language, I’d have thought you’d have spotted it before anyone else. Or maybe it’s because you weren’t looking.”

She could see Cassandra’s eyes dart back and forth, apparently replaying every interaction that she had ever had with Stephanie again in her mind.

“Normally,” Selina said, “I would claw the eyes out of anyone cruel enough to out someone without their consent. But these are not normal times.”

Selina pinched the bridge of her nose before she continued.

“Stephanie Brown has to be in the darkest place I can possibly imagine,” she said. “If she dropped her father on purpose…”

“She didn’t.”

Selina’s gaze snapped from her glass to Cassandra’s eyes. They were steely. Her face was resolute.

Her offhand hypothesis that Stephanie Brown had killed her father had raised some of Cassandra Cain’s considerable ire.

And the fallout of that considerable ire usually entailed broken bones and unconsciousness.

“Okay,” Selina said. “She didn’t. But that still doesn’t change the fact that her father was responsible for Game Seven. Gotham City will not be nice to Arthur Brown’s daughter.”

Cassandra’s face softened, and she looked down at her empty shot glass.

“When she gets back,” Selina said, “she’s gonna look to you in a different way than she will any of us. Because though she won’t say it, she’ll want something from you that you can’t give. Maybe not ever, and definitely not now. And when that happens… then you have to move Heaven and Earth to be kind. Kinder to her than you’ve ever been.”

Selina folded her arms on the bar and leaned in to look Cassandra in the eye.

“Can you do that?” Selina asked. “Can you be kind to my girl when she gets home?”

Cassandra nodded. She didn’t even hesitate.

Selina put her hand on Cassandra’s and allowed herself a smile.

“Another shot?”

Some thinking on Cassandra’s part, but she nodded again.

* * *

Selina helped the drunken and staggering Cassandra back to the room she slept in when she crashed at Wayne Manor.

She hugged Cassandra, gave her a brief kiss on the forehead (which was odd, as Cassandra had never known Selina to do that), before she departed the darkened bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

Cassandra unbuttoned her jeans, unzipped them, and then, feeling this was close enough, flopped down on the bed, fully-clothed down to her socks.

And once she lie down, her higher and lower brains went to war.

Right now? Right now she wanted Conner.

She had to wonder if this was what alcohol was supposed to do to her. To make her palpably thirst for her boyfriend. To long for strong arms around her, black hair to run her fingers through, a strong jawline to run her lips up and down.

As the entire rest of her body reckoned with that, her brain was alight with what Selina had told her.

Cassandra Cain’s best friend Stephanie Brown was in love with her.

And while Cassandra knew that Selina had not been lying when she said it, Cassandra wasn’t sure she bought it all the way.

It…

It was…

Cassandra didn’t even _know _ what it was.

Love?

_Really? _

And how did she not spot it? Yeah, Stephanie was friendly. Yeah, out of all of Batman’s network, Stephanie was the most eager to return her hugs. She didn’t get creeped out when Cassandra tried to communicate physically or nonverbally. She actually smiled when Cassandra put her hand on her face, sure, but that didn’t _mean _ anything. There were lots of people who were that affectionate with her. Like Conner! And…

And…

Cassandra’s eyes snapped open.

_“Ohhhhhhhhhh.” _

Then she closed her eyes again.

Thoughts were… weird, slippery things under the influence of alcohol.

So screw 'em.

If she couldn’t have her man or her best friend, then she would have sleep. She'd think in the morning. Now was not the time.

And as Cassandra circled the drain of unconsciousness, her more enlightened nature won out.

No matter what feelings Stephanie apparently had for her, Gotham City quite simply was not the same without her. It was still home, but it wasn’t home in a way that was as easily identifiable.

It had only been a day, but Cassandra missed Stephanie terribly.

And she opted to kindle a little kernel of hope, off in the corner of everything, that she’d be back soon.

* * *

It would be fourteen years before Cassandra Cain saw Stephanie Brown again.

* * *

** _TO BE CONCLUDED_ **


End file.
